Tetbury Goods Shed

Blake Architects were appointed by Tetbury Town Council following a competition of invited local Architects to provide designs for the conversion of Tetbury Goods Shed.

The Tetbury Goods Shed is one of the few remaining remnants of the Tetbury Branch Line that ran from Kemble to Tetbury and was closed in 1963 following the publication of the Beeching Report. The brick building was built in the 1890s and its original form has been altered little since.

We were asked to prepare designs for the conversion of the building into a community centre. We produced a simple concept which housed all the services in a pod to one end of the building, free from the side walls and without needing to make new openings in the existing walls. This ensured that the sense of volume was retained whilst meeting the capacity requirements for a cinema at a lower cost to previous proposals. Critically the original route of the train through the building was visually retained, this ensured that the building did not become a typical bland fit out but kept its industrial character.

The design of this was detailed with a simple pallette of materials that complemented, rather than parodied the austere brick interior as can been seen in our rendering of the proposal. Timbers from the loading platform were reused to clad the new pod with modern detailing and brick foundations exposed to show the original structure of the loading platform.